


Anomie

by cullionly



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 02:04:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cullionly/pseuds/cullionly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Days and nights slip quietly by faster than you can even imagine, and even though you constantly douse yourself in hot water and soap and scrub and scrub at your arms and face, you swear there’s olive green and indigo still clinging to your skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anomie

 

          You keep to yourself more than you ever have before. You’re growing up, your friends are moving on and dating dumb aliens- the ones that are alive, that is. It’s been half a sweep, and you’re beginning to forget what your old friends look like, what they sound like, how it felt to see different coloured text pop up on trollian in a quirk that you had to tear your hair out to decipher. You miss Alternia, even if it was a clusterfuck of assholes out to kill you for your blood. You even miss the veil, though you’d never dare say it. It was nice, in a way, to see your friends in the flesh and hear their voices, even though they drove you utterly insane most of the time. It makes your chest ache to remember Nepeta’s laugh ringing off the ceiling and the walls all night, how happy she was to be sitting cross-legged on the floor with Terezi, drawing with chalk and playing with scalemates. She was the only one of you who ever really acted her age.

 

          You know that Feferi tried to keep everybody together, not because she felt it was her duty, but just because she loved her friends. Most of you didn’t know her that well when you started playing; you’d talked to her a few times at most, conversations encircling you yelling at her for being so enthusiastic and her calling you a crab. The rest you knew through all those hours you spent trolling Eridan, when you would both put on the same romcom at the same time and gossip online, because his hive was practically on the other side of the planet. He complained about the plot holes and fuckups in movie physics sometimes, but he would mostly fire off hundreds of lines about his new moirail Fef, and how they’d been best friends since they were first hatched, and how his kismesissitude with Vriska was going great, and how they were unbeatable at FLARP. He only mentioned Gl’bgolyb to you once, when he was off on a tangent about his horrible and ghastly wound that would surely kill all chances of ever finding a matesprit in its hideousness. You remember that conversation surprisingly well- Sollux was over pretending to watch your weekly romcom, making dumb jokes about you going on virtual movie dates. He had his husktop out, switching between a billion windows like he was some sort of hardworking socialite, even though you both knew that all he was doing was switching between some stupid bee-nary code forum and the conversation between you and Eridan that you had added him to.

          He didn’t say much at first, instead choosing to observe your particular brand of gushing over the movie- that is, you ranting about the antagonist trying to break the endgame couple up and Eridan countering with point form explanations on how poorly executed their plot was, but you introduced him into the conversation (Eridan, I’d like you to meet the biggest asshole I know besides you. Hopefully your utter lack of proper social skills will cancel each other out and not multiply.) and he had started to add a few mocking one-liners, which sparked mixed reactions from you and the seadweller, which sparked more mocking remarks from Sollux, until you were tight-lipped next to each other, furiously typing out profanities. 

          It seems really surreal in retrospect, after everything that happened, that weekly romcom night became a thing between you three. Though they bickered and teased each other, Sollux and Eridan somehow became friends, and they never told you, but you knew that they would troll each other even without your intermediary forces. A few times every sweep, Aradia would make the trip from her hive in the middle of nowhere and join you three, and Eridan would notice the pause in the trollian conversation and know that you were talking out loud about things that he couldn’t hear and get so obviously anxious. He started inviting Feferi off and on after that, and Aradia starting coming more often.

 

          You miss those days. Fuck, you miss them so much. You miss Feferi’s smile, even miss her glubs, and since you’ve elected to forget about what Eridan did, you allow yourself to miss him, too. You wish you could have fixed his problems- not even in a pale way, but you were his best friend for a long time, and it made you happy, deep down, to notice him chipper up when he would announce that Fef was at the door.

 

          As you got older, you met more and more of your friends’ friends. Aradia introduced you to Tavros, who, unfortunately, dragged Vriska, who was coincidentally Eridan’s kismesis at the time, into the mix, and she brought Kanaya and Terezi, who knew Gamzee, who brought Equius and Nepeta, and pretty soon you were all trolling each other into the morning. It was cool, but also scary, to have friends from the far ends of the hemospectrum, since you all knew deep down that it could never last. It was partly why you decided to play the game- an unspoken oath that if you could all escape the burdens of culling drones and filling quadrants and Aradia dying of old age before any of you even left the planet, Sollux being sold into slavery, you being culled for being a mutant and Feferi getting culled by the Condesce herself, Equius and Nepeta being broken up and Eridan watching you all expire from some underwater paradise, that you would.

 

 

          But back to the blood on your hands.

         

          You wish you’d talked to Feferi more about her moirallegiance. You wished you could have known if she felt stuck between a rock and a hard place, if she felt the crushing hopelessness of trying to make Eridan listen to her, trying so hard to pacify him, but knowing that at any moment, his intrinsic instability would start to course through his royal blood and drive him to grab his gun and start blasting holes in people instead of his docile manner of sneering and spewing slurs at them, plotting their demise but not actually having the drive to carry through.

          The sopor slime became useless once you entered the medium, with no chucklevoodoos to slink away from, so you’d all starting easing into the habit of sleeping in piles, and on some occasions, actual beds that littered the medium. Beds were stupidly comfortable, with the added bonus being that you can feel and hear when Gamzee starts shifting around next to you, making scared little snarling noises like a cornered dog.

          He likes to sleep next to you, as most moirails do, even if you hardly ever allow yourself that luxury. You don’t like going into the dreambubbles like everybody else does. It’s almost like they aren’t real- you saw Feferi and Eridan from a doomed timeline, and they had no idea why you looked so guilty and angry, why your first reaction was to yell at Feferi to get away (but )(e’s my B—EST frond!) and your second to shout expletives, as you tend to do when your brain shuts down and turns to autopilot.

          You don’t know what sort of awful experiences Gamzee must have, since most of the doomed timelines are a testament to your utter failure and pale shortcomings, full of your friends, sometimes even yourself, dead by Gamzee’s hand.

          And when you wake up, they’re still dead. They’re still gone. You’re sick of Strider and Lalonde’s faces, and you’re growing sick of seeing Kanaya and Gamzee and even Terezi, just because they’re all you see day after day, and you cling to the hope of seeing Aradia and Sollux soon so tightly that your metaphorical knuckles turn white just because they’re something _different_. You don’t have to worry about not seeming useless around them, since Sollux already knows that you suck at everything and anything, and there’s something about Aradia that makes it seem okay.

          You can’t stand how much it hurts that your other friends will never be alive again. It’s so dumb how stupid and selfish it sounds, since Feferi made the dreambubbles so nobody would ever really die, and if it weren’t for the game, your dead friends would really be dead, and you would never speak again.

          Terezi told you that you’re being difficult by not dreaming as much as everybody else, and she’s right. She tells you all the fun that she has, how she roleplays with Nepeta some days and how she plays new FLARP campaigns with Vriska and Team Charge. She wiggled her eyebrows in that cute and enraging way and told you that you could dream up one of your romcom dates with Eridan, and you almost flipped the chair, yelling that they weren’t dates, and that there was no way in hell there was a timeline in which they were. She wiggled her eyebrows again and grinned a huge toothy smile, making a heart with her hands before running back to wherever she came from.

 

          As it turns out, there was a timeline where you and Eridan were together, in one of the red quadrants- you never found out which one, but Terezi’s stupid hand gesture gives you a pretty good idea. Eridan didn’t kill anybody, stayed best friends with Feferi, and eventually the two of them went God Tier before heroically dying trying to drag Equius away from Nepeta’s body before Gamzee got there, but he got there. Equius was impossible to move when he didn’t want to, even by two god tiers.

          Every dreambubble tells you a little something, and it’s never good. The only thing you learn from the failed timelines is that if you weren’t such a universal fuckup, you could have stopped Eridan and Gamzee from going off the deep end. That it was all your fault, every time.

          And above the feelings of guilt and regret, you feel alone. You feel trapped. You aren’t Feferi, who, for the longest time, loved giving Eridan advice that he never took, or Nepeta, who had no concept of how dangerous Equius would be without her. Eridan gave Feferi a best friend, and he fed her lusus when she couldn’t bear to orphan a troll. Equius protected Nepeta, kept her safe and taught her about the system, and all Gamzee gives you is crippling fear and a looming threat that if you slip up, the friends you have left are dead. You said he was your best friend, and you believed it for an hour or two, but the grin on his face isn’t the same with the clear orange eyes and lumpy purple scars from the girl that he killed. You pity him, but in the darkest part of your heart, you wish he was somebody else’s burden. 


End file.
